A ‘big break’ at 53 for musician, Lafayette native

David Corley has a rough baritone voice, one that makes you think of heartbreak, cigarettes and the low purr of a mountain lion.

How else would a 53-year-old singer-songwriter finally coming out with his debut album sound? The Lafayette native called on a recent Tuesday afternoon from Wolfe Island, Ontario, taking a break from rebuilding a porch in the Canadian chill to answer the question: After decades of trying music out, giving it up and then trying again, why now?

“It’s a long story,” Corley said.

It’s one that starts off in Lafayette, travels from McCutcheon High School to the University of Georgia and then spans the country — from Los Angeles to New York City, where Corley worked as a bike messenger — but always seems to return to the foothills of Georgia. “I went around like a rubber band,” he said.

The story has a lot of random gigs and odd jobs, like bartender, waiter, demolitions, carpenter and roofer. There’s a good amount of drugs, too, but that can be filed under the larger category of “debauchery,” as Corley puts it. Singing on the piano morphed into singing on the guitar (“I finally figured out that it’s hard to form a band when I’m dragging an acoustic piano around”), which meant playing songs in G instead of G-flat.

Talk of the 1980s rock scene in Athens, Georgia, inevitably leads to R.E.M. which leads to a mention of the Indigo Girls, who played the Long Center a few months ago in Lafayette. This makes Corley’s voice go way up high, a rare register for him, but one filled with youthful energy and excitement.

“I bartended in Atlanta for a couple of years, at the Harvest Moon Saloon,” he said. “The Indigo Girls were one of the house bands. Every Thursday night, man, the place would be packed with these two girls. It’s incredible what they’ve done.”

Things take a turn around the age of 40, when Corley was living alone in a cabin in the woods in Georgia. Something didn’t feel right. He checked himself into a hospital back in Lafayette. The doctor told him that, among other complications, a soft sac was hardening around his heart. It would squeeze his heart until it burst.

After surgery, Corley decided to settle down in Lafayette for a while. He met his high school sweetheart again, and helped her raise her family for several years. He started the band Medicine Dog, which plays “nouveau-retro soul-blues and barn lot rock ‘n’ roll.”

“It’s a slow process of being alive and trying to figure it all out,” Corley said.

Sometimes the big break comes when you’re 15. Sometimes you’re “an old man,” Corley said, when it arrives. By a stroke of chance, the Canadian instrumentalist and producer Hugh Christopher Brown discovered Corley’s hardscrabble songs and, in an old-post-office-turned-studio in Wolfe Island, helped Corley put together a band and an album, “Available Light.”

The result is a mellow yet insistent retrospective of old David Corley songs you’ve never heard before. If you want to hear more about Corley’s story, songs like “Dog Tales” and “Easy Mistake” are a good starting point. They say, “Hello. This is who I am. This is my life, my poetry.” Band members Brown, Gregor Beresford, Tony Scherr, Kate Fenner and Sarah McDermott round out Corley’s strong lead vocals.

Corley’s slated to perform in Canada and in Brooklyn. A Kickstarter campaign to get “Available Light” off the ground has exceeded its $10,000 goal, but the team still needs all the help it can get. Corley uses words like “whirlwind” and “surreal” to describe the experience.

“It’s been a lifelong dream of mine to make a record. It’s just never happened to me. … I’ve never experienced any success like this,” he said.

“I’m always surprised when I write another song,” Corley adds. “I just make things up. I’m as surprised as anyone when I make a decent song. … After all of this, I just want to make another record.”

Get the album

“Available Light” will be released on Nov. 18. For pre-order information, visit davidcorleymusic.com.